My life as a Missionary in the Santiago East, Chile Mission

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October 27, 2014 (Week 21)

Our week, honestly, was fomi. That would be Chilean for lame. I have stories, but they are all silly things that happened to us, and have almost nothing to do with missionary work. We worked hard, of course. In fact, we have a few days that we left at 12:00 and didn´t come home until 10:30 despite it being 32-34 degrees the whole week, and we still didn´t have that much lessons. We had some good lessons and we felt the spirit a lot, but it seemed like anything that had anything to do with other people´s agency didn´t happen. For example, not one of our investigators came to church yesterday. We don´t know why yet, but they were very sure they were going to come, and because all investigators need to come to church at least 3 times before they can get baptized, we don´t have any baptismal dates.

We did have two less actives come, which is really cool. Because it was their third Sunday, they are considered re-activated. One of them is Eliana, who I talked about a few weeks ago. She´s still doing well. The other was that guy who is missing the tendons in his hand.

Last Sunday was weird. There was this talk by an old guy which was so full of false doctrine it was ridiculous. He talked about the word of wisdom. He said firstly that if we eat too much meat with lots of grease, we can drink a little bit of wine to clean our bodies. He also said that the problems with tea and coffee is that it is hot, I guess meaning that if it was cold it would be fine. The worst part was this was the leader of the high priests. Our bishop came around afterward to all the classes and said to everyone that no, we don´t drink wine under any circumstances, nor tea and coffee. Even though it is his responsibility, it gave me a lot of respect for the bishop for doing that.

We actually have a really good bishop. He works really hard and he has a lot of love for the members here, and wants to get more people active. He went with us yesterday, and we went to this less active family. They got into a fight in front of us. Basically what was happening was the second youngest was swearing a lot, making the oldest who is preparing to go on a mission angry, making him bossy, making all of them fight, including their mother who neither attends church nor controls her mouth, who was telling them to smarten up. It was all very complicated, but the bishop handled it very well. Basically, in a very loving way, he called them all to repentance, and by the end of the lesson, they were all crying. There was definitely the spirit there, but there is still a lot of work to do with that family.

The weirdest thing that happened this week was when these two guys met us in the street. They were big for Chileans, and they walked strong and confident. They came right up to us and were like, “Hola, ¿cómo está? ¿De dónde son?” without any kind of warning or anything. Suddenly they were showing us their watches and how nice they are, and inviting us over for sandwiches. We were freaking out. Nobody except for drunks are ever that friendly with us. We thought they were going to rob us. I don´t walk around with anything expensive, and my watch that I wear is worth about 4 dollars, so I was actually kind of excited. We didn´t end up going to their house, because it was on the wrong side of Juanita. As they were leaving, they told us that they had all kind of guns and dangerous stuff in the house, and if anyone was ever giving us problems, we just needed to tell them we knew those guys. We have no idea what they wanted from us or who they were, but we are NOT going to try to find them again.

I don´t have any pictures for this week. Maybe next week. Love you all.